The world changed on the 25th May 2018 when the GDPR regulations happened.
So what happened?
I recall Sandler trainers and cold callers all saying this was like Y2K. There would be a whole lot of hype and then come the switch over nothing would change.
But it did.
This article is a nice summary of the fines and people that have been hit under the GDPR regulations.
We've all seen a massive reduction in traffic in terms of cold calls and unsolicited emails. Of course GDPR does not ban cold calling or spam emails but we now can do something about it. Use our right to remain forgotten for example. (Or just block cold callers on your iphone).
The big thing that changed was that push sales and marketing died. What is push sales and marketing? It's the Jeb Blount style of selling where you ring the same person everyday for six months and bully them into buying. That has all stopped.
As I mentioned above, I will always block cold callers on my mobile, I have reported a significant number of companies to the ICO who have sent me unsolicited emails. And I hope you do too! and we can end these interruptions.
It was in 2018 that CMO after CMO came to us and said, Marketing isn't working any more. 2 Billion (that's Billion) people use ad-blockers and that is growing at 30% year-on-year. And we hear story after story of people using advertising and getting nothing in return.
With the classic demand generation usage of advertising, cold calling and email gone, where do you go?
Go to where your clients are maybe?
If you read Simon Eskom's ‘Digital in 2019’ report you will see
There are 5.11 billion unique mobile users in the world today, up 100 million (2 percent) in the past year.
There are 4.39 billion internet users in 2019, an increase of 366 million (9 percent) versus January 2018.
There are 3.48 billion social media users in 2019, with the worldwide total growing by 288 million (9 percent) since this time last year.
3.26 billion
people use social media on mobile devices in January 2019, with growth of 297 million new users representing a year-on-year increase of more than 10 percent
82% of the internet enabled world is on social media. These are the people that buy your products and services.
Maybe it's time to switch that budget and resource to demand generation that IS GDPR compliant and not risk the fines?
Social Media.
The Netherlands, with 89.8 reported breaches per 100,000 people topped the list when the number of notifications were weighted against country populations, followed by Ireland and Denmark. Of the 26 EEA countries where breach notification data is available, the UK, Germany and France ranked 10th, 11th and 21st respectively on a reported fine per capita basis. Greece, Italy and Romania reported the fewest number of breaches per capita.
